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Ansel Adams at 100

Ansel Adams at 100 Open the full-size image

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By John Szarkowski

By Ansel Adams

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$150.00

Price

$225.00 CAD

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  1. Hardcover $150.00 $225.00 CAD
  2. Trade Paperback $40.00 $44.00 CAD

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In commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, Ansel Adams at 100 presents an intriguing new look at this distinguished photographer’s work. The legendary curator John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has painstakingly selected what he considers Adams’ finest work and has attempted to find the single best photographic print of each.

Szarkowski writes that “Ansel Adams at 100 is the product of a thorough review of work that Adams, at various times in his career, considered important. It includes many photographs that will be unfamiliar to lovers of Adams’ work, and a substantial number that will be new to Adams scholars. The book is an attempt to identify that work on which Adams’ claim as an important modern artist must rest.” Ansel Adams at 100-the highly acclaimed international exhibition and the book, with Szarkowski’s incisive critical essay-is the first serious effort since Adams’ death in 1984 to reevaluate his achievement as an artist.

The exhibition prints, drawn from important public and private collections, have been meticulously reproduced in tritone to create the splendid plates in this edition, faithfully rendering the nuances of the original prints. Ansel Adams at 100 is the definitive book on this great American artist. John Szarkowski is director emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the author of such classic works as Looking at Photographs, The Photographer’s Eye, Photography Until Now, and Atget, as well as several books of his own photographs, including the recently reissued The Idea of Louis Sullivan.

Genre:

  • "A book that's also art."

    The New York Times
  • "Long after the museum tour of Ansel Adams at 100 ends, this book will endure as a vital document of his vast contribution to the art of landscape."

    San Diego Union Tribune
  • "[Szarkowski's] incisive biographical essay and reproductions worthy of Adams' exacting standards make [the book] a fitting monument to an American visionary."

    Artnews
  • "[Adams] probably did as much as any artist of the 20th century to shape the American psyche, to change our perception of the world...These pictures strive for classical purity, order, and finality."

    Washington Post

On Sale
Aug 2, 2001
Page Count
192 pages
Publisher
Ansel Adams
ISBN-13
9780821225158

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John Szarkowski

About the Author

In a career that spanned more than five decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most ardent environmentalists.

John Szarkowski is Director Emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His most recent book is John Szarkowski (Bulfinch, 2005) and another of his books, The Idea of Louis Sullivan, was reissued by Bulfinch in 2000. Szarkowski lives in East Chatham, NY, and New York City.

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Ansel Adams

About the Author

In a career that spanned six decades, Ansel Adams was at once America’s foremost landscape photographer and one of its most respected environmentalists.

In Ansel Adams at 100, John Szarkowski notes that Adams’s role in the history of photography goes beyond his achievements as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a leader in the study and appreciation of photography as an art, he played a major role in establishing the first department of photography in an art museum, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the same department that Szarkowski led from 1962 to 1991). Moreover, as a tireless advocate for improving the reproduction of photographs in books, Adams “badgered and cajoled his printers and platemakers” till they had “achieved in ink an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the chemical print.”

Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, “Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,” Szarkowski writes, adding that “Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.” Szarkowski dates that experience to the early 1920s and a camping trip in the High Sierra. As Adams later recalled, “I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light…. I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”

Commenting on this moment of vision, Szarkowski writes, “One might guess that Adams spent the next quarter century trying to make a photograph that would give objective form to the sense of ineffable knowledge that on occasion, in his youth, inhabited him in the high mountains. Yosemite and the Sierra gave him not only his principal subject, but also the experience that provided the basis for a useful artistic idea: ‘The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor.’”

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